[rticesterp]

Isn't the better analogy that, "If I take aspirin with water for a hangover it works but if I take it with whiskey it makes the hangover worse. Why doesn't aspirin work with whiskey?"

I would definitely ask them why they think they need to take aspirin with whiskey for their hangover.

[jancsika]

No, it's more like, "Why do people literally float a few inches off the ground when they lick an aspirin then take a sip of whiskey?"

If that input indeed did cause that result, you'd expect a forum of human beings to have responses like this:

"Holy shit that result was most surprising! I have to re-evaluate my entire life now. Just curious, though-- what made you decide to lick aspirin and sip whiskey?"

Any response that didn't explicitly confirm the result would be signalling to the world that they are either a troll or a boring contrarian.

Similarly, `man` isn't ever supposed to output `gimme gimme gimme` as reported. That is surprising behavior. And that surprising behavior is trivially reproducible by the likely harmless act of setting your machine to the time specified and running it.

Thus, the fact that this reported case was actually a feature of `man` outs all the people who posted non-sequiturs as low-effort cranks. (Low-effort because they didn't even take the time to run a trivial test.)

Edit: just to be completist about it-- I suppose a respondent in either case could simply challenge the veracity of the report. But that's not what we're talking about here AFAICT.

Edit: to make a steelman argument here-- maybe not cranks, but people who have, for whatever reason, fallen prey to the act of low-effort crankiness.

[SamBam]

And yet I think the probing XY questions are still important.

The answer could have been simply: "It's an easter egg. It's from an Abba song." Done. End of discussion, it answered the question.

But by probing how the user wanted the thing to work, and why it was breaking his tests, and that it was actually happening when he used `man -w`, the maintainer actually understood that it was not a harmless easter egg, and fixed it so it didn't happen when called with -w.